Ghost Hunter Talks About Psychic Experiences

Haunted houses are not foreign territory for the woman billed as “America’s Top Ghost Hunter.”

Lorraine Warren, 81, a light trace medium and clairvoyant from Bridgeport, Conn., has been speaking at colleges for 39 years and will speak tonight in the Baker Center Ballroom.

Warren is known for her appearances on Discovery Channel’s A Haunting and her work with her late husband, Ed Warren, on high-profile cases such as the Amityville Haunting and the Haunting of West Point.

The Post’s Anna Hartenbach spoke with Warren about the paranormal, the Amityville Horror case and Halloween precautions.

The Post: What was the first memory you have of dealing with the paranormal?

Lorraine Warren: Well my husband actually grew up in a home that was haunted and it was in that home, for some reason, nothing was solved. … I believe that his searching was to see if other families experienced what he experienced at a young age, up until the age of 12 when they finally left that house.

Now myself, I had never been in a haunted house in my life, but I attended a private Catholic girls’ school (in Connecticut). I began to notice in our class that I was seeing lights around the heads of people — some of the nuns, the girls in class — and I made the mistake of telling one of the nuns that her lights were brighter than Mother Superior’s. … That was a big mistake. What I was really looking at was the aura around people — that is what I was seeing. … My first experience that was so profound was when I was in a home in Henniker, N.H., called the “Ocean Born Mary House.” In that house, I had an out-of-body experience where I could look down and see my husband sitting there and see the man that he was interviewing and see the couple that was with us but I was way above them. And I could see my own body …

Post: You said when you were about 9 is when you started discovering you had some abilities?

Warren: I didn’t know it was an ability; I thought everybody had it. I didn’t want to be different …

Post: So when you realized that you did have a gift, how did you hone it to make it more usable as a skill?

Warren: I put it in God’s hands. I put it in his hands to be guided in what I should do; of course, it has taken me into haunted houses throughout the world. We researched 27 years in the United Kingdom, we researched and worked with Buddhist monks in the mountains of Japan, and we worked in Australia. We’ve worked all over the world.

Post: So it said that your skills could be described as a clairvoyant and light trance medium with the ability to see, hear and feel things through a sixth sense and read people’s aura, which you’ve already talked about some. Can you explain some of these things like clairvoyant?

Warren: To see, hear and feel beyond the normal five senses.

Post: Can you tell me about some of your more prestigious cases, like the Amityville Horror case?

Warren: Well, I can tell you that the Amityville Horror, the Amityville case I should say, with reality we spent tremendous amounts of time with the family, with the Catholic priest that was involved with the case. We fell victim just as the priest had fallen victim and the family. I very seldom really talk about that.  That is a real personification of evil, that home. I don’t really talk about it, but believe me, that was reality.

Post: How did you get involved with it then?

Warren: Well first of all the family, the DeFeo family, was murdered and then the Lutz’s moved in and they fled the house after a matter of days. So the medium got involved and Channel 5 news out of New York City — a man by the name of Marvin Scott — he contacted us. … So that’s how we were brought to it.

Post: Can you tell me about being on A Haunting and Paranormal State? What kinds of things do they have you do on these shows?

Warren: … I discern in these homes what it is we are dealing with and what it is that needs to be done to rectify it, like bringing in the clergy or things of that nature …

Post: What keeps you traveling to colleges?

Warren: … Bringing knowledge to people your age is very, very important. And bringing the true knowledge and not some of the nonsense that some of these other shows and people are doing. … And carrying on my husband’s legacy is extremely important to me.

Post: Do you have any final thoughts you would like to add to anything?

Warren: Well at this time of the year I like to tell people, you know, how to protect yourself.  Don’t do foolish things. Don’t play with a Ouija board, don’t go and try to conjure spirits because it’s the Halloween season and don’t go into graveyards for the sake of going into graveyards. Because you are opening doors to an occult world and it can be extremely dangerous and have very sad aftereffects on you.

http://www.thepost.ohiou.edu/Articles/Culture/2008/10/20/25956/

Adventurers Claim To Have Found Bigfoot

A team of Japanese adventurers say they have discovered footprints made by the legendary yeti, which is said to roam the Himalayan regions of Nepal.

“The footprints were about 20cm long and looked like a human’s,” Yoshiteru Takahashi, the leader of the Yeti Project Japan, said.

Takahashi was speaking after he returned with his seven-member team from their third attempt to track down the half-man-half-ape, tales of which have gripped the imaginations of Western adventurers and mountaineers for decades.

Despite spending 42 days on Dhaulagiri IV - a 7661m peak where they say they have seen traces of yetis in the past - the team failed in their prime objective of capturing one on film.

But Takahashi said the footprints were proof enough.

“Myself and other team members have been coming to the Himalayas for years and we can recognise bear, deer, wolf and snow leopard prints and it was none of those,” he said.

“We remain convinced it is real. The footprints and the stories the locals tell make us sure that it is not imaginary,” he added.

Photographs of the prints have been posted on the expedition’s website, www.everest.co.jp/yeti2008/.

The team had set out nine motion-sensitive cameras in an area where Takahashi saw what he thought was a yeti during a previous expedition in 2003.

“It was about 200 metres away in silhouette. It was walking on two legs like a human and looked about 150 centimetres tall,” said Takahashi.

Despite their lack of success this time, the team plans to continue the quest.

“We will come back as soon as we can, and we will keep coming back until we get the yeti on film,” said Takahashi.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24529424-24331,00.html

MoD Studied Paranormal In War On Terror

SECRET documents have revealed the MoD have been studying the paranormal and other unexplained scientific phenomenon for use in the war against terror.

The newly released files show that just after 9/11, the Ministry of Defence conducted a research project into psychics - with the possibility they could be used to locate terrorist cells.

Last night saw the UK debut of the eagerly anticipated US TV show Fringe, which takes its name from fringe science, an umbrella term for such bizarre notions as ghosts, UFOs, psychics and invisibility.

The series, from JJ Abrams, the creator of Lost, centres on FBI agent Olivia Dunham and uses paranormal plots following in the X-Files tradition.

Coincidentally, as the show takes off, the truth of just how seriously our Government have taken fringe science is slowly emerging.

As Abrams has said: “Though you could say it’s science fiction, the weird thing about Fringe is that a lot of the stuff is at least in the realm of possibility.

“When Star Trek came out and they had their communicators, that was a cool dream. Now, in our pockets, we all have communicators. We read a week ago that invisibility is coming. There’s stuff you wouldn’t think in a million years is possible, and it’s happening every day.”

That’s also the official approach according to Nick Pope, who once ran the MoD’s UFO project.

He said: “Everything that you think is Sci-Fi, someone in government or in the private sector is trying to get it to work.”

In the Nineties, he worked for the MoD in a department blandly named Secretariat (Air Staff), looking at strange phenomena including UFOs, crop circles and even ghost sightings on military bases.

The research continues today.

Nick said: “As with all these fringe sciences, the reason we are doing this isn’t necessarily that the MoD corporately believe in things such as anti-gravity, mind control and telepathy.

“But it is a classic example of what we call low probability, high consequence - which is basically saying it is a long shot, but if we can get just one of these fringe science things to work, the military applications would just be phenomenal.”

Freedom of Information has led to the disclosure of top secret MoD documents which show the Government have been looking seriously at fringe sciences. We can assume they didn’t want us to know about it as the documents are marked “Secret UK eyes only” - one of the highest classifications used by the MoD.

One study into the phenomenon of psychics, or remote viewing as the MoD call it, was secretly commissioned only a month after the New York terror attacks.

A questionnaire was sent to psychics, none of whom knew it was an MoD project, and it was probably disguised as an academic study. NICK said: “It raises the question of what other academic studies looking at fringe sciences are being run by the military?”

In the documents, there are hints of small breakthroughs. Testers asked psychics to identify a series of hidden images including a wine glass and a picture of Mother Teresa.

The files reveal the psychics “may have accessed some features of the target” - that is, the images. Later, it even talked about recruiting one or two of the psychics to “go after the sensitive targets”.

The next part of the study was blacked out but coming so close to 9/11 would suggest that terrorists were the “targets”.

It is well known that most police forces have used psychics for years, but the extent to which the Government and the MoD use them is unknown.

Nick said: “According to documents recently released, it transpires that defence intelligent staff have also been dabbling in other fringe science areas.

“These include exotic propulsion systems and even the possibility of using energy fields to modify people’s behaviour, hinting at the exploration of mind control.”

Nick suspects much of the research is contracted out to defence corporations run by ex-military, which means the MoD can get round the Freedom of Information Act.

Quinitiq, the recently privatised UK defence research organisation, have been doing research into invisibility and Bae Systems were looking at anti-gravity.

Nick admits that when he was first given the job of looking into unexplained phenomena, he was sceptical.

But his research into UFO sightings and access to formerly classified files soon convinced him that the phenomenon raised important defence issues, especially when the witnesses were military pilots or where UFOs were tracked on radar.

He said about 80 per cent of UFO sightings could be explained as misidentifications of something ordinary, such as aircraft lights or satellites.

And he admitted that in about 15 per cent of cases there was insufficient information to draw any firm conclusions.

But he said approximately five per cent of sightings, including some in Bonnyrigg, Midlothian, seemed to defy conventional explanation.

A new survey has shown that 88 per cent of people in the UK didn’t know their Government had fringe science projects and 77 per cent thought it was a waste of money.

But Nick said: “At first, I probably thought it was a waste of time and money as well, but these are fairly modest bits of research.

“Tome, all the scientific progress we have made has come about because we dared to dream and push the envelope of human understanding to the limit.

“If we took the view that all these things are a waste of money, we probably would never have developed the aeroplane or the rocket.

“There were always people in history saying that things were impossible but we did it anyway. Some of these things may just be things we haven’t figured out how to do yet. It seems crazy not to try.”

Fringe stars relatively unknown Australian actress Anna Torv, probably best remembered for playing a lesbian love interest in the BBC series Mistresses, and the two-hour pilot cost £5million.

The show will stick to familiar paranormal territory but, in a departure from JJ Abrams’ Alias and Lost, each episode can stand alone.

Abrams hopes people’s fascination with fringe science will get them tuning in to his latest production on Sky.

He said: “It’s definitely meant to scare the hell out of you, but it’s also meant to make you laugh.”

Fringe continues this Sunday at 9pm on Sky1 and Sky1 HD.

‘It transpires that defence intelligence staff have been dabbling in other fringe science areas’

http://www.modoracle.com/news/Government-Studied-The-Paranormal_16634.html

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/editors-choice/2008/10/06/revealed-how-the-government-studied-the-paranormal-for-use-in-war-on-terror-86908-20777467/